Jerrod frantically waved his arms about his face and hair, trying to fend off any spiders that might have associated with the cobwebs he’d just put his head through. His frantic movements kicked up a layer of dust in the attic, he caught a lungful and doubled over coughing. He sat down hard on an old box labeled ‘Scrapbooks-Attic.’
“Everything ok up there?”
“Yeah mom, just dusty is all.”
“Well take a break and get some fresh air. Lord knows your grandma wasn’t climbing the ladder to get into that attic. You’re probably the first one in there for a decade or so.”
Jerrod wasn’t close to his grandmother, but the woman had a mysterious quality about her that made his imagination go into overdrive. He waved a flashlight around the tiny crawlspace one more time before acquiescing back down into the chaos of his mother’s organizational efforts.
His mother, thumbs tucked under the straps of her work overalls, was staring despondently at the cluttered mess of hoarder nonsense stacked to the ceiling of what had been her mother’s bedroom and muttered to herself, “Jesus, mom.”
He walked up behind her and threw an arm over her shoulders. She rested her head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry we’ve got to spend spring break like this, sweetheart. I didn’t realize it would be this bad.”
Jerrod shrugged. It was a welcome distraction for him. He hadn’t made many friends since they’d moved, and he was hoping having to clean out his grandma’s hoarder house would make for a sympathetic story to tell girls when school started back up again. “Should I be looking out for anything in the attic? Or just moving the boxes down?”
His mother thought for a moment. “Well, most of the stuff around the house is garbage, but she hasn’t touched the attic since before the hoarding got bad. There might be some cool stuff up there. I’ll get started on her bedroom if you want to just peek around and explore.”
“So far it’s mostly cobwebs and scrapbooks, but I’ll keep looking.”
His mom pulled him in and gave him a kiss on the head and he playfully pulled away. He climbed back up to the attic and started shifting boxes around and carrying them down the ladder. Scrapbooks, baby clothes, Christmas ornaments, cookbooks. Then as he had worked about halfway through the odd assortment he found a shoebox that was simply labelled ‘MDME LOREAUX.’
It was light when he picked it up, and unsealed. He popped it open and turned the flashlight into it. He laughed. Inside was an old doll in a frayed dress, a matchbox, a few candles, and what looked like an old bird’s skull. He carried it down the ladder to show his mom, “Hey ma?” She didn’t answer.
He carried the box down the stairs and into a cluttered kitchen. Pushing a stack of Time magazines off the table, he sat down and dumped the box’s contents out on the table. The doll was made out of a corncob wrapped in silk with a gob of wax for the head that had been roughly carved to resemble a human head. He opened the matchbox and found it full of what looked like bird and fish bones. He picked up the bird skull and studied it closer. It had a long fishing line attached to the back with a knot at the end, maybe there was more to it somewhere.
As he played with it, rolling it around in his hand, he jerked away from a shooting pain in his hand and dropped the skull to the table. He’d accidentally cut his thumb on the beak somehow and a small bead of blood began to form, rounding with surface tension. He went to the sink, dancing around a few stacks of old newspapers, rinsed his thumb in cold water and wrapped it in a paper towel.
He walked back over to the table and picked the skull back up, seeing his bright red blood on the tip of the beak. His face scrunched in curiosity as he also felt something dangling off of the back, and when he checked he saw one of the chicken bones was now dangling from the fishing wire attached to the skull.
Jerrod shivered. He didn’t believe in ghosts or the supernatural or voodoo, but he knew that bone hadn’t been there a second earlier so he threw the contents back in the box and carried the whole thing back up to the attic. As he came down his mom was filling yet another industrial garbage bag with detritus and stopped when she saw him, “Find anything cool?”
“Nah, just a lot of old junk,” he said as he passed her. She reached out with a hand covered in a dusty work glove and grabbed his arm, holding his hand up to her face for inspection. “Honey, your thumb is bleeding. You didn’t cut yourself on a nail or anything did you?”
He was surprised to see the wound still bleeding, it had only felt like a little poke. “Uh, I don’t know.”
Her eyebrows rose. “You cut yourself on something up in that filthy attic and you don’t know what you cut yourself on?”
“Uh, yeah. I mean, no.”
She sighed . “Ok, get in the car. We’re going to urgent care to get you a tetanus shot.”
After a good deal of protesting and “Mom I’m fine, really.” Jerrod’s mother got him into the front seat of her Toyota and drove him to the nearby Urgent Care clinic. He waited, embarrassed, among all of the other patients. One guy clearly had a nail through his hand and was holding a bloody towel around it, but the blood was soaking through and had started to drip onto the tiled floor. A drunken college student sat sniffling and holding her arm in a sling. Another mom was clearly having an allergic reaction and gobbling pink antihistamines as she tried ineffectively to keep her kids within reach.
Waiting took an hour and a half, but once they were in it was a quick shot. The nurse tried to take his pulse, but was unable to find it. When she checked his eyes with a flashlight she frowned slightly.
“What is it?” His mother asked.
“I’ve never seen pupils like his,” said the nurse, motioning his mother over to look. Jerrod shifted uncomfortably, “What’s wrong with my eyes?”
The nurse squinted and turned the light on and off. “That’s so strange. When I turn the light off, your eyes look normal. But when the light is on your pupil has these little red specks in it. It looks like they’re moving around.”
His mom asked if that was associated with tetanus and the nurse shrugged and said it wasn’t associated with anything she’d ever heard of. His mom promised to make a follow-up appointment with their primary care provider and they were finally back out into the parking lot.
“We probably could have finished cleaning at least one room if you didn’t drag me here.”
His mom held the keys out to him. “Well, now that you’re safe from tetanus, let’s make the trip worth it. Time to practice driving at night.”
The raccoon seemed to have come out of nowhere, and Jerrod didn’t have time to swerve. He hit the brakes as the animal made a heavy “thunk” against the front of his mom’s blue Toyota Camry. His mom instinctively yelled along with the squeal of the tires, the pitch of both sounds matching oddly, but she recovered quickly and tried not to seem shaken.
“It’s okay, J, it’s okay. Turn on your hazards and we’ll go check it out.”
The raccoon hadn’t been big enough to leave a dent, but there was a conspicuous spray of blood across the grill. The actual raccoon seemed unusually deflated, and when Jerrod poked it with a stick the body skidded across the pavement without any resistance.
“I think it was dead before I hit it,” he said hopefully.
“Dead raccoons don’t jump out in front of cars baby.” His mom watched him push the carcass around a bit, and bent over to squint at it through the illumination of the headlights.
“It’s like it’s all dried out.”
His mother just stared, frowning.
“Maybe a chupacabra got it?” He tried for a laugh but his mother just motioned for him to get back in the car. “Sorry sweetheart, but mom’s driving the rest of the way home.”
Once Jerrod got back to his room, he sat down at his desk in the dark and opened up his laptop. The glow of the screen illuminated the rest of the desk and as his eyes adjusted he jumped as he noticed the bird skull resting at the edge like a paper weight.
He chuckled at his nerves and went to turn on the main light, picking up the skull and trying to remember when he’d left it there. He thought he’d left it at his grandmother’s house in the shoebox. He saw another bone had been attached to the fishing line, and the fishing line seemed to have changed as well. It was now slightly red colored, thicker than it had been. He put the skull on a piece of printer paper and drew a circle around it with a sharpie, then took a picture with his cell phone.
His mother’s screams jolted him awake. He dashed out into the living room to see his mother at the door with her hand over her mouth in surprise to see a dead bird on the porch. “Oh, sorry for waking you sweetie. Looks like someone’s cat left us a gift last night. Could you put on some gloves and get rid of that thing for me?”
Jerrod and his mom did their best to explain away the bodies of small neighborhood animals that kept showing up around them over the next couple of days. The skull never moved from the printer paper and Jerrod had stopped thinking about it until he noticed that the fishing line was no longer a fishing line. Picking it up, he marveled at the change, wondering if his mom was playing a joke on him. The skull had been accruing more bones, and where the fishing line had been there was now a thick veined cord that left streaks of blood across the paper he’d put it on.
He was afraid to tell his mom about it. He didn’t know what was happening but whatever it was had something to do with his grandmother and a little more to do with death, blood and bones than he was comfortable with. How would he even go about explaining what was happening, even showing her wouldn’t help. It would surely worry her just as much to find a bloody pile of bones in her son’s room.
He kept an eye on the object, and it began to look more like some kind of hideous bone caterpillar out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. It never moved uniformly, but as it got bigger different sections of it would writhe and jerk noiselessly on the piece of printer paper. He noticed retrospectively that it was most active after another dead body showed up.
Two weeks after it had started he woke up to find the pulpy pile of bones was no longer on the paper. The paper had turned the oxidated brown color of old blood and streaks of fresh blood led from the paper, off of his desk, and across his carpet to his bedroom door.
Jerrod gulped and grabbed a National Geographic magazine, rolling it up as he crept out of his room and saw the trail somehow leading up the stairs. Adrenaline hit him in a wave, that’s where his mom’s room was.
He sprinted up the flight and froze in his mother’s bedroom doorway. She was lying in bed on her back, with a sunbeam coming in through the window above the bed’s wooden headboard and perfectly framing the monstronsity that was resting on her chest.
It was no longer a pile of bones, but a more fully formed mock-up of a caterpillar, except for the carapace of bones wrapped around the body that lit up as it pulsed down the length of its body, stretching the bones sections out and excreting a stringy whiteness that had started to coat the bones. It was making a cocoon.
The black length of body holding it all together with the glowing streaks of veins that still leaked blood onto his mother’s pajama top. Jerrod’s breath caught in his throat as he neared, afraid to check if his mother was still alive. But as he neared the bed she turned her head slightly and moaned at him. Her eyes were open, but only just barely. “Fire,” she mouthed at him.
Fire. Kill it. His adrenaline surged once more and he swung the National Geographic at the bone caterpillar once, twice, then he saw the skin beneath his mother’s shirt glowing as if a flashlight was being pressed against it from the inside. Every capillary glowed as if aflame.
He let out a yell and grabbed it, peeling the sticky mass slowly off of the flesh and fabric. The bones were slick and dug into the flesh on his hand, but everywhere he touched the black mass within and it caused his skin to buzz and his nerves twitched in response as though it was an electric shock. It was all he could do to keep his fingers wrapped around it and his whole body tensed. His mother seized up and yelled with him, but he was afraid to stop. The mass came unattached with a soft ripping noise and he threw it against the wall where it splattered wet and sank to the floor giving off a slight hissing noise.
His mom held her chest and rolled back and forth, moaning “Fire. Set it on fire.”
As Jerrod took a step towards the wall, the caterpillar’s body rumbled and popped, the different bones spinning variably until thin black legs grew out from between the bones and it began scuttling across the floor with a nasty clicking sound. Jerrod instinctively grabbed a wire waste basket and overturned it on the monster. The waste basket had been full of papers that stuck to the caterpillar’s bloody wetness as it thrashed in vain to free itself. He held the waste basket down against the floorboards, quickly shifting his hands to evade the caterpillar’s quick strikes out with the bird skull face it had originally pricked him with.
Suddenly Jerrod’s mother stood above him, blood soaked into the front of her shirt. She dumped a small bottle of liquid onto the waste basket and it quickly soaked into the paper. The smell of fingernail polish remover hit him in a wave and his mother walked over to her dresser and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Don’t let it go,” she muttered to Jerrod, bending over and lighting a piece of soaked paper on fire and jerking back as the whole bin went up quickly in flames. Jerrod jerked back and started to look for ways to put the fire out but his mom put an arm around him and used the other to put a cigarette in her mouth, then lit it skillfully.
“I… didn’t know you smoked.”
“I used to. And the past has a funny way of coming back around.”
The fire burned out quickly, but it seemed to stick to the bone caterpillar in an unnatural way. The body hissed and writhed as embers made their way around the bones and into the dark parts of the body. Foul, metallic smelling steam rose from the waste basket.
Jerrod put his arm around his mother. “This wasn’t Grandma’s, was it?”
The caterpillar had stopped reacting and his mom kicked the basket over and picked up a little pile of bones attached with a fishing line. “This doesn’t belong to anyone, sweetie. This is just a bad idea somebody had.”
“But it wasn’t just an idea. It made me bleed, it attacked you.”
His mom took a long drag. “No, this was an idea. Somebody thought that if you attached bones with a fishing line it would make a bone caterpillar. And it did. But a bone caterpillar already existed somewhere.”
“Somewhere?”
“Baby, sometimes what you think is just an idea can already exist in another… space. Another dimension or something. Just waiting for someone to try to create it so that it can transgress time and space along a path we can’t understand. Someone thought of a caterpillar made of bones, and some trans-dimensional parasitic horror show used the avatar of that idea to cross over.”
A moment passed as Jerrod tried to take it all in. The bone caterpillar jerked slightly, trying to reach his mother’s hand with the bird beak, but she swung it away skillfully.
Jerrod backed up, “It’s not dead.”
“It can’t die, Jerrod. But it can form a cocoon. Let’s not find out what happens if it metamorphoses.”
Jerrod nodded, dumbly.
His mom put out her cigarette onto the bone caterpillar and it squealed slightly. She shot him a devilish grin, “Now, show me that box and I’ll show you what those candles can do.